324 Thurs
the Study of Education was declaring that there “have been few points in
educational discussions on which there has been greater agreement than
that of the desirability of teaching the scientifi c method.” Despite the oc-
casional inductive- sounding descriptions, educational reformers increas-
ingly identifi ed this method with the collection of observations and the
formulation of a hypothesis, followed by its testing and rejection or modi-
fi cation if it proved unfi t—the series of easy- to- teach- and- memorize steps,
a sequence familiar to many students today. As early as the 1880s, the
geologist Grove Karl Gilbert described the scientifi c method that should
be taught in schools as generating a working hypothesis (or rather a large
number of working hypotheses to prevent attachment to any one theory),
testing, then discarding as necessary. By the second quarter of the twen-
tieth century, this sequence was often formalized into a numbered list. In
1933, John E. Almack, professor of education at Stanford, offered a sixfold
division, which included fi nding a problem, planning an approach, col-
lecting data, generalizing, verifying, and evaluating.^59
Scientifi c method thus provided an important means of identifying
and attesting to the presence of science. Americans also continued to put
it to use exorcising error and misconception from the realm of the truly
scientifi c. There were numerous opportunities for such exorcism after the
turn of the twentieth century. The antievolution crusade of the 1920s,
which led to the Scopes Trial, pit those, such as William Jennings Bryan,
who decried the perversion of true God- friendly science by the forces of
atheism and radicalism, against self- described defenders of independent
and agnostic scientifi c truth.^60 The interwar years also witnessed grow-
ing interest in occultism and spiritualism, which sometimes claimed the
sanction of science. Yet, objected one critic of investigation of psychic
mediums (who often worked in informal circumstances rather than in
laboratory conditions), the layman “does not realize how rigid is the con-
trol required by scientifi c methods.”^61
Self- perceived outsiders could also use the same tactics against those
in the scientifi c mainstream, sometimes in ways that occasionally limited
the potential scope and reach of science. Charles Lane Poor, an astrono-
mer at Columbia University and one of the few outspoken American crit-
ics of relativistic physics, suggested that the rapidity with which advocates
declared relativity proven contrasted with the caution of the “accepted
scientifi c method” as demonstrated by Darwin.^62 Even nonscientists
turned to scientifi c method in this way. The writings of some prominent
advocates of the new physics and relativity during the 1920s and 1930s,
including the British astronomers Arthur Stanley Eddington and James
Jeans, on topics that verged on the mystical prompted one Hollywood